


Strange Treasures

by Nemonus



Category: Trollhunters (Cartoon)
Genre: Adults with Jobs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Interspecies Relationship(s), Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-11 00:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15303327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: It’s the first day of her new life. Wet black tracks in her yard like signatures on a yearbook: Jim stood here, sharp-armored and heavier than he should be. Argh stood here, flat-footed and broad-shouldered. Walt stood here, deep, small talon-marks like a forger’s signature.Barbara Lake decides whether or not to trust the man who both saved her life and threatened her son's.





	Strange Treasures

It’s the first day in the world. 

The first dawn after the darkness, and the sky fuming gray-green shadow like all hurricanes at once. But her house is standing, and most of the school is standing, and Ophelia Nuñez has the mayor on the phone. Barbara Lake worked until Dr. Truro recommended she go home, told her that the second shift was ready and the EMTs caffeinated, told her that she had that look in her eyes that meant — well, this time it did not mean she didn’t know where her son had gone. She knew exactly where he was going. 

It’s the first day of her new life, and the back door is still on its hinges. She pushes it open (loose, preoccupied with her own long fingers because the last hand she touched with anything other than professional concern was Jim’s) and sits down. The back fence is splintered, the grass dug up and fragrantly dying. Wet black tracks in her yard like signatures on a yearbook: _Jim stood here, sharp-armored and heavier than he should be. Argh stood here, flat-footed and broad-shouldered. Walt stood here, deep, small talon-marks like a forger’s signature._

It’s the morning that should never have happened, the impossible lightening of the Darkest Night, order rising bright out of chaos as simple and sharp as the edge of that silver sword. 

Barbara Lake looks at the new day and thinks of magic. 

So here she is with her hearth and home filled with real magic, vibrant and natural as boulders in a stream, so passively and hideously great that it made everything else look thin. Her house, the Nuñez house — all along hadn’t her kids been telling her that safety was just a wooden facade behind which the real world moved? She had _worked_ to pay off this house, for years and years. She took twelve hour shifts and dusk-to-dawn days so that Jim could grow up in this house with his best friend down the street. Pure luck ( _magic?_ ) that Jim knew how to cook. He was always so kind to her, and what was there left for him to make? Frozen meat wrapped tight, those apples in the fridge. Every morning, Jim had said that he loved her, whether or not he used words. 

Something not a sob comes out of her. A hitch, an heave of an emotion she can’t name. 

The door opens behind her. Strickler hasn’t changed back from his stoneform; maybe the wings keep him warm, or maybe now that the town knows, it doesn’t matter what he looks like. She thinks he must have complicated thoughts about how lies are baked into his nature, how both faces are half-truths. For now he assesses the shadowed stoop and hands her a cup of tea, in one of the heavy mugs, and sits beside her. A ring of smoothed-over scallop shapes dig shallow into the side of the mug. Someone has taken a bite out of it, but the tea doesn’t spill. 

“Thank you,” Barbara says.

“I never imagined I would see the other side of Eternal Night.” He’s looking up at the ugly green sky, the blue patches and yellow rays as if the sky needs to remember how not to look cursed. 

“I was just thinking the same thing.” 

Funny how they would coordinate like that, two people from opposite sides of the — _oh._ The troll-door. 

She glances at him, seeing mostly teeth and the polished green of one thin arm. “When we were down in the … in the troll market, you told them that you would trade the world for me.” She sets the tea cup by her side, passes her hand over it to feel the wet warmth and to give her hands something to do. “I know it was part of the plan, and I thank you for that. But I wanted to know if …” 

_You can’t just ask someone. You can’t just ask a stone monster from — from_ where _? And how old_ is _he? — to say they’ll come back to you._

There are more difficult things to say than _I’ll trade the world for you_ , though, and _I needed you to come back_ is Barbara’s _._ It makes the other words easier.

“I told the truth,” Strickler says. “As rare an occasion as that may be.” He sounds bitter, like throwing the kids’ anger back at himself. But Jim trusts him by now, and after tonight Barbara thinks she might too. 

“You know, I never could have predicted any of this,” she says. “Trollhunting, Eternal Night, Claire and Toby in that armor … it’s insane! Or would sound that way if I heard about it a year ago. But even from the start … I had a good feeling about you.” 

He runs a hand over the back of his head, across the uneven dappled stone of his horns and the ragged ends of graying hair. He starts to say something, chooses careful but different words. “Jim is strong. He will be all right.”

“He had good teachers.” 

He raises an affronted eyebrow at the plural and she smiles, fixing his expression in mind because he looks so _arch_ when he’s wounded, digging into that lava-well of restrained and tended pride. And because she wants to match it, wants to reignite the feeling she felt with goblin blood on her hands, or the weight of that shovel. She wants to fight beside him again. 

Strickler looks at her. “You were his first good teacher.” 

“I bet you say that at all the parent-teacher meetings,” she says, and takes his hand. It’s work to lace her left with his right, to get used to the smooth, cool stone of his fingers. He had been so comfortable with touching her in the museum, their human hands clamped clammy together, and then, well, she had hardly registered holding him in the air, the wind bashing at her face and those dragons in the sky over California. Close up his skin has the slight transparency of human skin, with suggestions of reflected light underneath, sprout-green and cat’s-eye yellow. It’s just slightly warm, like a pendant often handled. 

Again he looks away, and it’s awkward enough that she picks up the tea and drinks (chamomile, slightly warmer than the summering air). 

“Each class moves on to their next stage of life eventually,” he says. “I keep in touch with some of them. There’s a historian in India, and a professor who certainly knows more than I do about 18th century Scotland, and a few ball players. Sometimes I thought of Jim being the Trollhunter as a sort of graduation.” 

_Other times you thought of it as a threat to your own power._

“But now that he’s really gone, and left us with a chance to return the lives that were stolen from the familiars, I’m the one in uncharted territory,” Strickler continues. 

They and Blinky had already speculated on what kind of spell might free the familiars, whether it would be best to find homes for them first or raise them in Arcadia or something else. Strickler had, with an almost threatening determination, begun to research how best to ask the familiar babies themselves what they wanted. 

“I think we all are, now.” Barbara says. “At work, half the people thought it was a power outage and the other half were talking about aliens and monsters. People … adapt. Everyone kept working, too tired and busy to be interested. It could have been … unicorns attacking and no one would have batted an eye.” 

“Unicorns are especially repulsed by pollutants in the water,” Strickler mutters, deathly serious and almost silent. It’s a joyless recitation, aimed at the ground. “You aren’t likely to find one south of the Cascades.” 

Her giggle might be slightly hysterical but she allows it. “They don’t have those in New Jersey?” 

“I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely know what to expect on the East Coast. Our trolls were immigrants there long ago, and might have faced the persecution of the strange there, or some other trouble; magic unfamiliar to them, perhaps. If they left a heartstone unattended, they must have departed in a hurry. With the gyre network in ruins it could take a week or …” 

Barbara blinks back tears. Does he have to be so honest about _this_ , of all things? Lie about who he is for months, and then tell the truth about Jim maybe not coming back for weeks? 

She tries to concentrate on her surroundings instead. The sky is getting darker, eldritch afternoon shading into real dark green evening that smells like cut grass and dew with the slight acidic backdrop of smoke. Crickets chirp, impossibly loud, from somewhere in the tree line past the fence.

“Sorry.” He looks back up. In the dimness, the glow in his eyes is especially sharp. “I know you are concerned about their fates.” 

She takes a deep breath. “They’ll text.” She pats her pocket for her phone. 

Strickler’s hand tightens around hers. “Yes.” Other words are caught in her throat, but she’s struck with the desire to talk about anything except Jim. She has gone through every emotion she has about him, and they’re beginning to loop. 

“I ought to check on Toby,” she says so that she has somewhere to go, and Strickler’s hold slackens instantly. He has no desire to trap her, she thinks, or is being careful not to give that impression. With his reputation, he could do with being so careful. With the need for an apology comes the frustratingly vague implication that he has something to apologize for, and it is with discomfort that she leaves the tea cup on the flagstones. 

* 

It’s the first night in the world.

Unspoken law that they’re all staying at the Lake house that night; Toby on the couch, supposedly first watch but probably asleep with his hand around the axe. Healthy as can be except for some dehydration solved easily enough. Blinky in the basement awaiting second watch and pacing, all the paintings turned around except — well, Barbara isn’t sure which ones he chose. Safest house in the world, full of people who Barbara had to give Truro’s speech to: _you’ll be better in the morning if you get some rest now._

And the part the other doctor didn’t say: _Gunmar is dead. Morgana (Morgana!) is dead._ Barbara is going to have to get new history books.

Speaking of — Strickler has been in the bathroom, the door open and the yellow light falling ever-so-familiar into the hall, since Barbara started cleaning up downstairs. The broken floorboards will need to wait, but — 

She passes him on the way to her bedroom, like it’s casual, like she doesn’t have red on her cheeks and a glass of water in one hand. She had considered aspirin, decided to ask first whether it would work. 

“Walt? Are you all right?”

His voice is still gravelly troll-tongue, working a rocky way around those teeth. She heard him _growl_ at Gumnar’s minions, when they were both on the ground and she ached with impact, and the sound lodged in her beneath her ribs. “Just cleaning up.” 

She peers around. He’s standing in front of the sink, tunnel-visioned, washing his hands like Lady Macbeth. If he had human skin, she was sure it would be pink-raw.

Barbara frowns, suddenly hesitant, and juggles her phone in one hand. She waits, nervous as the first date, scrolls, and finds an opener that won’t ruffle his dignity too much when she walks in. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.” 

Strickler sighs like the earth moving. His shoulders slump, thin and drab with the wings tucked close; perhaps she loves the monster parts best. She recognizes the kind of slackness with which she opened the back door. He turns the water off. “The stone dust, from the Gumm-Gumms, I can’t seem to … oh, isn’t this a great farce.”

“Have you had enough water to _drink_?” She puts the cup on the countertop.

“I had some when I made you the tea.” She can tell by now when he’s avoiding putting emotion into his voice. Is he sabotaging himself? 

She takes one of his hands between two of hers, circles her fingers across soap and water and stone. “I acknowledge that was half an answer and proscribe you drink this. You’re all right.” Bent as she is he can probably see the gray at the part in her hair, but she dismisses qualms. He’s _green_. 

“I thought I might sit on the porch, take that first watch.” He nods. When she lets go, his fingers curl weakly on the porcelain as if he’s forgotten they’re attached. 

“If Toby doesn’t have it, Blinky will. You think he’ll let the kids out of his sight?” _Again?_

The babies are still sleeping in the crystal cradle — something that might be adding to Strickler’s guilt now that she considers it more fully. Maybe that’s why he’s trying to flay himself. But _kids_ for her still includes Jim, which takes the ache in her stomach and moves it toward her heart. 

“You’re right,” he says. 

“Come with me,” Barbara says. 

He’s startled when she puts her arm under his and, with practice moving people heavier than either of them, steers him and the glass of water into the hallway and toward her bedroom. 

“You’re too tired to do anything but sleep,” she mutters. 

“Awake enough to kill for you.” He growls close to her ear, trollish.

She wants to stop, to marvel at him, but memories of work propel her and her patient into the bedroom. (Just one glance for Jim’s door. Best not to think too much about that yet.) She eases him down on the near side and he sets about burying himself wings and all while she puts her phone and the water on the bedside table. She undresses in the bathroom, throws on a long, threadbare shirt from undergrad, and leans over the bannister to check on the living room. As expected, Toby is asleep in his armor, one arm hanging off the couch and his mouth open. Blinky sits with the armchair turned around toward the door, a bag of crystal bombs glowing at his feet.

Good enough.

Barbara drops into bed wishing she had washed the sheets more recently, then doesn’t think anything at all. 

*

It’s the first morning in the world.

Going to sleep was easy, but staying asleep after 5 a.m. proves difficult, not because Barbara isn’t tired but because Jim’s absence down the hall has become like a phantom. She presses her cheek against the sheet, listening for morning sounds: the sizzle on the stove, the bubble of the coffee pot, the door opening as Jim goes out to meet his friends. She isn’t deluded enough to think he might be there: the previous night’s memories are all too strong. It’s the reminders she wants, the present overlaid with memory so strong she can almost smell it like the coffee. _Give me a minute,_ she chides her own mind, _to pretend I think everything is okay._

The door squeaks open, and Barbara is standing and running around the foot of the bed before she realizes why she moved. There’s a lamp on the dresser she could bludgeon something with if she has to. She grabs for it, pulls and feels the resistance of the cord, and decides it’s more important to _see_ first. Something behind her snaps full like a sheet in the wind, but she needs to _see_ , not even sure whether she expects or fears Jim at the door or Gunmar. 

She grips the bannister, taking stock. From the upper floor she sees an armored and seemingly wide-awake Toby open the door for Ophelia Nuñez and Not-Enrique. 

Barbara exhales and subsides back into the hall. Time to go. This is a real summer morning and it is time for her to get dressed and talk about what Arcadia Oaks _is_ now.

When she turns around, Walt’s teeth are bared. He’s all fangs and talons, a bristling bird-shape with posture she knows, one wing tipping a picture framed on the wall. She raises her hands, half startled and half awed, and pushes his chest forcefully enough that he steps back.“It’s okay. It’s Ophelia.”

His wings slump. “You got up so fast I …” 

“ _Everything okay_?” Ophelia’s voice echoes in the stairwell. 

“Yes!” Barbara shouts at the same time as Walt asks, “Are you?”

“Only our friends have passed this portal!” Blinky thunders out of sight, louder than he looks.

Some terror Barbara didn’t entirely know she had melts away. Sour pity follows it: everyone is so jumpy. There’s an adult human in the living room now, though, so Barbara is comfortable enough to turn her back on both the stairwell and Walt and head back toward her room. She hesitates at the dresser, unsure whether she wants to dress or go back to sleep. The sheets weren’t _un_ comfortable, and she isn’t as nervous as she was on the porch. She presses a finger to her phone, but there are no messages. 

Maybe Walt can tell she felt unmoored, because when she turns to go back to bed he hesitates with a hand on the doorframe. “Barbara, we need to talk.” He speaks quietly but firm, a tone for emergencies on the other side of town. _The power has gone out. There was a quake up north._ Maybe the tremors will reach Arcadia; maybe they won’t. 

She’s aware that the shirt leaves most of her legs bare, but that isn’t important when they’re still figuring out the aftermath of the war. Whatever Walt has to say — well, he owes her some care. 

“Okay.” She sighs, sits on the side of the bed. 

He hesitates, wings folded, then sits beside her. Voices mutter from downstairs. 

“I need to be truthful,” Strickler says. 

“I remember most of what happened now. I’ve seen the good and bad of you already.” 

“We are like the moon: we all have dark and light and scars. There’s … a little more.” 

“Go.” 

“I regret deeply, and hope for understanding now that you see the circumstances, but in the cause of complete transparency I must add that in an effort to improve his fighting ability I may have at one point drugged your child.” 

She feels very cold, then very warm. Static of fear, then the clear signal of trust: Jim is alive. Jim is a force of nature, his will more powerful than the Last Day of California. It’s nice to have proof of that. She says, “I enjoyed hitting you with a broom.”

“I know. And you had every right to.”

“Is the drug … still affecting him?”

“Certainly not. With his new troll form … Well, ironically it might have prepared him, if only in the slightest, for the shock of the transformation he endured this week. It was a potion made of … corpse dust, from dead trolls.”

She winces. “But all that’s over. And now that he’s …. Well, this all seemed very shocking to you too. To Merlin, even. Has there never been a half troll before?” 

“Not exactly. It’s … complicated, and the races have been so separated, if only by the barrier of sunlight. Trolls aren’t always kind to those unlike themselves.” 

“They’re like humans that way.” 

He meets her eyes and takes her hands, first one then both in a lazy stretch across the blankets she wishes she saw on a better day. “That connects to what I ned to tell you next. Because the human familiars have been returned to this world, I will never be able to adopt my human form again. I was never fully troll either, something both troll market and Gunmar never failed to forget, but now I’m …” Wings twitch behind his back. “This. Probably forever.” 

Troll forever. Will he get his job back? It strikes her as mad that she’s worried about whether a changeling will be able to collect his salary. When did her life become this? But the fact that it is, now, is not unpleasant; not in the way that painting those surfacing memories was. Paint slashed across surprisingly expensive canvas, hours in which she worked half-mindless to capture the hatred in yellow eyes.

Did he rehearse this speech, ordering words while she slept? Was he half-awake with guilt all along? “Through everything, through the names and the orders, I never regretted being a changeling. We demanded justice, not with words but through our existence, our network. I believed in that. And I will continue believing, whatever form I hold, whatever Arcadia becomes. Whatever … we … become.”

Whatever he sees in her face now wearies him. Crestfallen, his expression reminds her that she has a choice: to accept or reject the truth offered by this man who has been monster and guardian, trickster and hero. He was out for himself, except when he was looking out for her. 

She touches his cheek. He leans into her hand, pressing further against her arm when she slides her hand onto his forehead and into his hair. She has never touched him like this in this form, isn’t sure whether anyone has. Not lately, judging by the way he indulges in it. 

“I’m glad you told me the truth,” she says. “But maybe, when I tell you I’m worried about my son, just _try_ to be comforting.” 

He sits up, presses his forehead against hers. “I will take that to heart, as the first solemn lesson of what Barbara Lake needs from a man learning to be human.” 

She feels her cheeks heat up. “There’s nothing wrong with your troll form. This isn’t going to be easy, but you having wings won’t make it worse.”

“What flattery,” he says, sarcastic, but the joy in his voice lightens the mood. 

“I’m going to talk to Ophelia,” she says, and stands.

“What _time_ is it?” His grumbling weariness sounds so human, as if he’s only just realized it’s a quiet, warm summer morning instead of some mythic timeless twilight. She scoops her phone off the dresser and hands it to him, noting for herself 5:11 and no notifications. The picture of Jim she took not long ago, silver armor and a human face, is painful but not unbearable. Her son is not dead. Walt catches the phone in clawed hands familiar with the shape. Downstairs, someone has put coffee on.

**Author's Note:**

> [Title source.](https://www.inspirationalstories.com/poems/adventure-laura-benet-poems/)


End file.
